Mark Steyn on Blair and the Terrorists

Thanks to Hugh Hewitt for the link to Mark Steyn's column today in the Daily Telegraph. Mark Steyn is my favorite columnist, but I have trouble keeping up with all of his prolific writing.

Although today's column is targeted to the British readers of the Telegraph, his lessons shouldn't be lost on us over here across the Pond.

It's not black (the bomber) and white (the rest of us); there's a lot of murky shades of grey in between: the terrorist bent on devastation and destruction prowls the streets, while around him are a significant number of people urging him on, and around them a larger group of cocksure young men gleefully celebrating mass murder, and around them a much larger group of people who stand silent at the acts committed in their name, and around them a mesh of religious and community leaders openly inciting mayhem, and around them a savvy network of professional identity-group grievance-mongers adamant that they're the real victims, and around them a vast mass of progressive elites too squeamish about ethno-cultural matters to confront reality, and around them a political establishment desperate to pretend this is just a managerial problem that can be finessed away with a new bureaucracy and a bit of community outreach.

Devastating. But he doesn't stop there.

And at the end of this chain of shades of grey is you. And, be honest, were you surprised at any of the developments of the past four weeks? Was it really shocking to you that young men born and bred in the United Kingdom are willing to take bombs on to the Tube and buses? Were you stunned that cells of Islamic terrorists from countries with which Britain has very few traditional or historical ties are living at taxpayers' expense in London council flats? Were you knocked for six to discover that bookstores in Leeds sell video games where Muslim men can play at slaughtering infidels? Were you flabbergasted to hear Birmingham's senior and famously "moderate" Islamic cleric, invited along by the West Midlands Police to their press conference, argue that the men named as responsible for the attacks were merely innocent commuters?

Or were you utterly unsurprised by any of this? Was it, indeed, all too predictable?

We're not at all different from Great Britain in this. Substitute "the subway" for "the Tube," "New York" for "London," "Chicago" for "Birmingham" and it all still fits.

We need to get radical, because that's what our enemy is. Even France--France, for Pete's sake--has learned that it needs to get radical too, and they're throwing out the worst of their Islamist imams (story here).

What are we doing? We're still living in "murky shades of grey."